An amazing number of things had to happen in the distant past for each of us to exist. I learned that from “Finding Your Roots,” Henry Louis Gates’ public television show that traces the genealogy of celebrities.  

Indeed, I am struck by the way long-ago events aligned to produce me. 

My mother was my Henry Louis Gates.

Evelyn Everly Elbert had a passion for history, which she passed on to me. About the time I graduated from high school, Mom began a family history project that she worked at for most of the remainder of her life. 

Mom was in her late 40s when she quietly and determinedly began researching family histories, first my father’s family, then her own. This was decades before the internet, but she soon learned how to access Mormon genealogy records in Utah through public libraries. 

She started with family stories and Bibles, which included family-tree pages, where births, marriages and deaths were recorded in longhand cursive; some of it was legible, although a lot was difficult to decipher.

My mother had super powers. She brought to her new hobby two special talents. One was a mathematical mind. She loved numbers and loved to make them balance; one of her careers was as a bookkeeper. Her other talent was the ability to type; at another time in her life she was a professional typist, very fast and very accurate. 

Putting those skills together ensured that her research – packaged in three-ring binders – would not only make sense but be readable by family members for generations to come.

Which brings me to a story she recorded about my grandma Cecilia Elbert. 

To me, Grandma Elbert was always old and healthy; she was 63 years old when I was born in 1947, and she was 109 when she died in 1994. 

But she did have a brush with death as a child.

“The winter she was 16, Cecilia developed Diphtheria,” my mother wrote. “As she was recovering, she developed a weakness or paralysis. She first noticed she could not lift one arm and then both arms. She became so weak she could not walk across the room. She also lost her eyesight to the extent that she could not distinguish between her Dad and her two brothers. It was June before she could go outside.”

In that pre-vaccine era, diphtheria was a serious and potentially fatal illness. 

But Grandma recovered. She finished high school and went on to teach, before marrying my grandfather, John J. Elbert, in 1909. Both were 25 when they married, which was relatively old in those days. 

They had known each other from the time they were 10. That’s when John’s German immigrant parents moved to a farm outside Whittemore, where Cecilia’s German immigrant family also farmed.

Their paths parted when she became a teacher in Faribault, Minn., and he went to Des Moines to attend business school. 

He returned to Whittemore before she did. John ran, and later owned, the local lumberyard, bought farmland and was engaged in other civic and business operations.

They saw each other when she returned for vacations and holidays. John asked Cecilia several times to marry him, but she demurred, saying she wanted to experience life first. 

After three years, she gave in. They were married in 1909 and had five children, including my father, Willis, who was born in 1921.

Grandpa was a successful entrepreneur and all was going well until late 1927, when he took ill and suddenly died three weeks later at the age of 43. 

It was a huge tragedy from which my father never completely recovered. 

But without John’s early death, it is doubtful I would be here. That’s because in 1939, Cecilia moved her four youngest children to Ames so my father could attend Iowa State College.

Dad never graduated; the war intervened. But he did meet and marry a shy girl from Bondurant.  

As is true with most of us, a lot of things, some good, some bad, had to happen for me to be here.